Melissa PritchardBesprekingen

Nearly everyone knows who Florence Nightingale was, but this book reveal so much more. It's a portrait of the 19th century society of drawing rooms that she lived in and the battlefields she worked in; the long, crinolined dresses she wore and the obstacles she faced. Pritchard moves beyond the "legend" of Florence nightingale to the woman who rebelled against her family and her society to move nursing to a skilled practice. Highly receommed.

As a girl, I read I-don't-know-how-may Florence Nightingale bios, but they were largely the kind of hagiography handed out to children and nothing like Melissa Pritchard's Flight of the Wild Swan. Fictional biography is an odd genre because one wants to read it as truth, but one can't do that. I don't know how much the "real" Nightingale was like the Nightingale Pritchard gives us, but Pritchard's Nightingale is an excellent woman to spend time with: fierce, brilliant, furious about the limitations placed on her sex, querulous, impatient with family, and unrelenting in pursuit of the life she has envisioned for herself.

Flight of the Wild Swan—like many Bellevue Literary Press titles—is a book that helps us see beyond the simpler versions of stories we think we're familiar with. It offers an excellent read.

I received a free electronic review copy of this title from the publisher via Edelweiss; the opinions are my own.

Keep the scientist, the statistician, the nurse. Preserve the myth. History a jumble of half-truths anyway. Let the fire eat her rage, her failures. Let her become what each generation needs her to be. A light to lead the others.
from Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard

This is the story of Florence Nightingale, one of the most remarkable women in history.

This is the story of a brilliant mind who chafed at society’s restricted roles for women and who believed she was the hands of God, called to heal.

This is the story of despair and torment. Florence was born to a comfortable life, expected to marry and produce a male heir to inherit her father’s estate. But she was drowning in the life of fireside gossip and tea. Only when her despair had reached it zenith was she allowed leaway to follow her dreams of becoming a nurse.

This is a story of conviction and courage, of self-denial and servitude. She went into hell on earth, the battlefield hospitals and dead houses, and ministered to the war wounded with dignity and care. When she arrived in Crimea, more soldiers were dying from disease than in battle. She brought cleanliness, healthy food, hope. The changes she instituted vastly reduced the death rate.

Sanitation, hygiene, statistics–these are my earthly Deities.
from Flight of the Wild Swan by Melissa Pritchard

This is a story of higher calling, of a universal faith. On a trip to Egypt her understanding of a higher power was broadened, deepened, became encompassing. She listened for God’s voice to lead her, but adhered to no one doctrine.

She shunned her growing fame, suppressed her own needs, was driven to work and serve past human endurance. Even after her health broke down, she continued her reform work, using her beloved mathematics and statistics to institute groundbreaking medical practices.

In the novel, a doctor complains about the “poor chaps” who were “bribed by a shilling and a pint of beer” and “marched into the field and slaughter.” He asks, “For what? For the queen. For land and sea. For pride of empire. For that and that alone, a generation dies.” And Florence is conflicted about her role as nurse, knowing that once recovered, her patients would be sent back to the front. She could not rest, but spent her nights in the wards, lighting her way with a lantern, becoming the mythic Lady of the Lamp as she ministered to the suffering.

Florence Nightingale soared into history and legend, but in these pages you will meet a very human, conflicted, inspired, unforgettable woman. From the claustrophobia of her family to the pestilence of the Scutari hospital, Pritchard pens haunting scenes, and the letters and diary entries in Florence’s voice brings her into vivid profile.

Thanks to the publisher for a free book.

A solid collection of essays on the writing life, Daschunds, grief, and sadness. I have read anything by this author before but this is good writing.

(The publisher sent me this book along with a book I won from a LibraryThing Giveaway).

Very detailed and interesting review of essays.

I found this book of fifteen essays really slow paced. I also had trouble understanding some of the essays. Maybe it was just too over my head. I really tried to finish this but I couldn't get through it.

Fifteen essays make up this uneven collection. I found them all difficult to read for various reasons. I wasn't impressed with her Room in London, it was just blah.

Time and Biology: On the Threshold of the Sacred was so full of literary name dropping that I never figured out what Pritchard herself was trying to say. I don't mean name dropping in the gossipy sense that she claimed to personally know these writers, but, rather there so many brief quotes that I was annoyed that the essay was written show how well read she is. Sixteen pages of that.

Doxology is thirty boring pages about her dog. Her grief of her parent's deaths, the title essay, rates only twenty pages--much of it about the cost and procedure of cremation. There were also brief, lightweight pieces on Walt Whitman and Georgia O'Keeffe. There are other short pieces that aren't especially memorable.

Finding Ashton, about a US female soldier in Afghanistan, was moving but there was too much about Melissa Pritchard and not enough about Ashton Goodman.

"Still God Helps You": Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave is the most powerful essay in the collection. It is a well written piece of social journalism. Here Pritchard lets Manyuol tell his story with a minimum of insertion of Pritchard's feelings and beliefs. This was the sort of writing I had hoped for when I requested the book, I wish there had been more like it.

As a fan of Pritchard's writing I was excited for the chance to read this essay collection. And it didn't disappoint! The best part of this book is that it didn't feel like you were reading a collection of disconnected essays- more like you were having an afternoon chat with a friend. Highly recommended!

I enjoyed reading these essays. Pritchard's language is elegant and clear, sophisticated but not pretentious. She seems to approach the essay in the spirit of the original etymology -- to test, to try, to weigh -- and so some of selections may be too brief or too meandering for readers who expect an essay to have a clear thesis or theme, thoroughly elaborated. I was able to just enjoy the ride, and at the end of each essay, I had a list of interesting questions I wanted to explore in my own writing, topics to research, and books and other texts to hunt down and read. That's enough for me.

I think I would have liked some more organization to the collection, be that thematic sections or some thread that I could trace through each essay. Additionally, at times I thought Pritchard overdid one of her recurring themes: writers "as priests, as prophets, as soul transformers" and books as "devotional objects." I suppose in many ways I agree with her about the potential of literature and the responsibilities of artists, so this may just reflect my constitutional dislike for quasi-mystical hyperbole (and my skepticism towards anyone who puts herself and her fellows up on too high a pedestal).

This is an extraordinary collection of essays. They range from meditations on writing to odes to her dog to an examination of a life of a young man who escaped from slavery in Sudan and made his way to the US. From the seemingly mundane to the sacred, Pritchard writes in a marvelously clear voice that illuminates the power and importance of the writing life.

A Solemn Pleasure is a fantastic book of essays. From a brief stay in London, to the death of the author's mother, and the story of a child slave, each one makes you think. I laughed, was frankly envious of one, and cried at several others. My favorite essay might be Doxology, about the author's Dachshund; though A Room in London is a close second.

One thing I loved about this book is that the writing is up close; personal. I felt less like I was reading a book of essays, and more like I was having a series of long conversations with a friend. Anyone who enjoys reading essays will love this book.

(Full Disclosure: I received a review copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer program).

I wanted to love this book of essays but I felt pulled in many directions and I could not find a unifying theme, or even a unifying voice. The essays range in tone from the whimsical to the elegiac. Some feel like fragments of something that might have been good if Pritchard had spent more time on them. Some drag on, in particular the one titled "Doxology" which may have been meant to be funny. I feel as if these fragments of writing were written by different people and for different audiences.

Although this collection is published in a series entitled "The Art of the Essay" I feel the book instead shows ways the essay can stray, examples of how a potentially good essay can be led in fruitless directions when an author spends too much time alone and without editorial feedback, or tries too hard to innovate in a category of writing that is already well understood. I could have done without the lists, the unexplained fragments of poems, the portentous quotations that just lie there on the page and aren't discussed in any way by what follows from the author.

The most maddening piece of writing in this collection was an 'essay,' and I do apologize for writing air quotes just then, entitled "On Kasper Hauser." Kasper Hauser is a great topic for a thoughtful essay. But Pritchard's 'essay' in this collection is nothing more than a page and a half of her experience of writing an essay about Kasper Hauser, an essay not published here but that was apparently published in Conjunctions magazine. All we get here is a page and a half of description of Pritchard's experience of writing an essay about Kasper Hauser. She ate scones at the time.

This volume is lauded in many blurbs on the back which just makes me feel that the literary fiction community of writers is an incestuous group of back scratchers.

In A Solemn Pleasure, Melissa Pritchard paraphrases a Sufi parable for one of her essays titled “Elephant in the Dark.” To me it captures one of the most compelling thematic arcs of her collection: the slipperiness of art or art’s ‘many-sidedness’:

“Some Indians kept an elephant in a dark room. Because it was impossible to see the elephant, those who wanted to know something about this exotic beast had to feel it with their hands. The first person went into the darkness and felt the elephant’s trunk and announced, This creature is like a water pipe. The next person felt the elephants’ ear an asserted, No. It’s like a giant fan. A third person felt the elephant’s leg and declared, That’s not true. This animal resembles a pillar. A fourth person felt the elephant’s back and concluded, Not at all. It’s like a throne. Different points of view produce different opinions. If someone had brought in a candle, they would have all felt like fools.”

In many ways, art can be described as this kind of groping around in the dark—a necessary attempt at guessing the higher truths. Pritchard uses this folktale to preface one of the more didactic essays in the collection that discusses fiction writing technique, but to me it also encompasses Pritchard’s larger intent: to argue and show that art is a form of transcendence, that it can bring a little light into a largely banal world, that writing can be “active prayer.” The essays in A Solemn Pleasure might be seen as mere inspirational accounts but they are done remarkably well: they elevate your sense of creative purpose and also teach something practical about that kind of creative living. Pritchard is exhorting us to think grand but stay grounded. To Pritchard, writing isn’t a job or a vocation—it’s tantamount to a kind of divine calling—but one that shouldn’t keep you above the fray or inflate your sense of importance or intensity of your ‘suffering.’ I did roll my eyes at some of the heavy-handed attempts to deify the writing experience (evoking the American Transcendatalists; think Emerson and Thoreau) but looking past these moments there were some gems that were just the right balance of the personal, philosophical rumination, and reportage that I find strikes the right flavor profile of essays I enjoy.

Some noteworthy pieces in A Solemn Pleasure:
- “A Graven Space” (on painter Georgia O’Keefe, “an artist of uncommon and cultivated paradox.” It is an essay where Pritchard argues that we need to demystify the idea of creation: “Many of us stay busy inventing reasons not to create—we complain, while, and will not work because we are terrified of doing so…”; “crank down the pedestal.”)

-“Still God Helps You: Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave (a retelling of Pritchard’s experience meeting and helping 33-year-old William Mawwin, a student in Phoenix, Arizona, a man who survived slavery in Sudan; feels like a straightforward human interest reportage piece and yet Pritchard draws out strong lessons on empathy and importance of the writer-as-witness)

- “Decomposing of Articles of Faith” (more a prose poem than an essay that alternates lines of a prayer with transcendental musings)

- “Time and Biology: On the Threshold of the Sacred” (explores whether writers and artists have a kind of ethical or moral responsibility or whether there is such a thing as art free of a moral or political stance of some kind.)

It’s hard to categorize the kind of writer Pritchard is. Some essayists have that writerly lyrical power that wow you with the sheer force of their writing; others have a strong narrative bent, a knack for drawing you in with their storytelling; others have that journalistic smarts and can weave in the personal with contemporary and historical analysis, drawing from current events and footnotes; others still can be profound just by their navel-gazing self-examination, revealing themselves in ways that reveal the world. What I don’t like are writers who go full-tilt digressive, who think the essay grants them license to verbal-vomit all over the place; some readers like that kind of hazy brushstroke, but I don’t usually or can only tolerate it in very, very good writers (see Rebecca Solnit). To her credit Pritchard’s writing feels tighter than most mainly because most of the essays here are relatively short and focused, either topically or conceptually. That said, Pritchard’s essays don’t jump out for being exemplars of any of these aforementioned styles. But in some way, this made A Solemn Pleasure so delightfully readable. Pritchard wasn’t straining herself like a singer hitting those high notes she has no business hitting (which is what I felt was the main problem with much-hyped Empathy Exams from Leslie Jamison.) At the same time, there are no standout essays here, no one single piece that truly bowled me over. Overall, pretty solid as a whole. And I will take away the parable about the blind men and the elephant and Pritchard’s wonderful lessons on the writing life.

This was a thought-provoking set of essays, highlighting various aspects of a writer's life... inspiration, growth, dedication to the craft as opposed to the paycheck.

While not all of the essays resonated with me, personally, I particularly liked Elephant in the Dark for its exploration on what perspective truly means, A Graven Space for the push for women to be true to themselves as artists, and Decomposing Articles of Faith, if for no other reason than the beauty of her words.

These were a pretty heady, but incredibly well written, bunch of essays on a range of topics, but most had some thread into what it feels like to live a writer's life, or maybe more accurately, an observer of life to enable one to write. Being a writer, I thought I would find a bit more inspiration here (especially on the art of essay, which I'm just learning about), but really there are the thoughts, opinions and feelings of the writer. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but for whatever reason, I found these really slow going and not that enjoyable. For a reader to spend this much time in another person's thoughts probably only works if she resonates with the author; and I did not feel that connection. However, I have vowed to let some time pass and give them another go. It is the kind of writing that did make me think and consider in a new way, and there were moments of discomfort, and that is powerful writing.½

I received a copy of this book free in the same package as an Early Reviewers book.

As with any collection of short stories, there are some hits and some misses. I only highly recommend "Patricide" and "The Nine-Gated City." Some of the more experimental stories, such as "The Hauser Variations," are interesting but not particularly enjoyable to read.

I am as enchanted as anyone by beautiful, lyrical writing. Being able to evoke a place or create a unique character or capture the fluid nuances of dialogue is incredibly important in the best writing. But sometimes in the quest for this transcendent writing, authors do too much, taking their language from the sublime to the overdone. And sometimes the search for the perfect word or descriptive phrase is too evident and forced in the writing to make for easy and seamless reading. This was the case for me with Melissa Pritchard's novel, Palmerino.

Sylvia Casey is a writer. Her previous books were not enough of a success for her publisher to stay with her if she doesn't produce a blockbuster of sorts this time around. As if struggling professionally isn't enough, her husband of many years has recently left her for a man. She's come to Palmerino, an enclave in Italy just outside Florence, to recover personally and professionally as she researches the life of Violet Paget, a Victorian novelist best known for her supernatural stories under the pen name of Vernon Lee. Paget was a polymath, feminist, and lesbian who fully inhabited the created persona of Vernon Lee and Sylvia Casey wants to write a fictional biography of the not very well known author, hence her retreat to Palmerino, where Paget/Lee lived out much of her life.

The story has a triple stranded narration, telling the story of Sylvia and Violet/Vernon as well as the ghost of Vernon, who slowly creeps into Sylvia's consciousness before possessing her incrementally, in an intentional echo of Vernon's own writing. When the narration focuses on Sylvia, it centers on her writing, the lush, atmospheric place that Palmerino is, and her discoveries about the little known writer on whom she is growing increasingly fixed. The portion centered on Violet/Vernon tells a fairly straightforward biography of the writer, using her own diaries, letters, and the impressions of those around her, painting her as impressively intelligent, socially abrasive, scared of intimacy, and needy. When the spirit of Vernon narrates the tale, there is a sense of gathering menace and a disturbingly self-congratulatory feel in the pleased accounting of what she can make Sylvia write and do.

The narration gives the sensation of having a dreamy veil over it. Everything, whether necessary, tangential, or completely immaterial to the plot, is described in detail, giving the whole of it a florid and meandering feel. The pacing is slow and made for a very soporific read for me. The ending is a bit strange and otherworldly, another echo of the real Vernon Lee's work, but inevitable for all that. While I found the story a struggle to read, there are many glowing tributes to the book and the writing. Certainly the question of inspiration, research, and authorship, loneliness and connection, and the close link between this world and the spirit world are all present in the text but ultimately they don't seem to drive anything or to be examined fully in the course of the novel. In the end, the biggest irony for me is that Sylvia's manuscript, called Palmerino, is deemed unreadable.½

I received a copy of this book through the Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.

Pritchard's Palmerino was a pleasant surprise for me. It's just under two hundred pages, and the blurb promises the story of a biographer being (literally?figuratively?) possessed by her subject. Although it starts slow, it successfully creates a lethargic atmosphere and fully realized setting. Pritchard bounces back and forth between Sylvia's (the biographer), historical Vernon's (the subject), and a ghostly Vernon's voice. Food and setting are so important, both to Sylvia's modern Italy and to Vernon's historical Italy. The details are sumptuous.

This is a mildly unsettling unraveling of reality, or perhaps a slow infiltration of a ghost into a full possession. The subtlety creates a more unnerving experience.

I enjoyed Palmerino and I believe I'll be reading more of Pritchard's books in the future.

Joy's review: Most of our book group enjoyed this book much more that I did. I found it to be all atmosphere and no plot, point or action. But if you want to read lush descriptions of Italian gardens and dreamy descriptions of life in the 1900's, to for it.

Sylvia is living in the Villa Il Palmerino, the former home of the writer Vernon Lee. She's there trying to recover from being left by her husband and to write a biography of Ms. Lee. The book goes back and forth between Sylvia's experience writing the book, and biographical pieces of Ms. Lee's life.

The writing is inventive and the use of language is creative with lovely descriptions of people and places. But I found the story to be disjointed and lacking in narrative coherence. I wanted to know more about Sylvia or Ms. Lee. Both of their stories seem to be incomplete with many questions left unanswered. There was a lack of depth to the characters and while the author brushes around the edges of Ms. Lee's sexuality, she seems almost afraid to really explore it and how it may have impacted Ms. Lee's life and writing. One thing this book did do is make me more curious about Vernon Lee, someone of whom I had never heard before. Unfortunately, I will now have to read a different book about her to satisfy that curiosity.

Vernon Lee, or Violet Paget, was by all accounts an immensely gifted and intelligent English essayist, art critic and writer of ghost stories. Befriended and admired, if sometimes feared, by her peers Lee was one of the leading lights of the Aesthetic Movement. She counted Henry James and Oscar Wilde as friends. John Singer Sargent’s portrait of her bears a remarkable likeness to Wilde. She also was a lover of women and had passionate relationships with three.

Melissa Pritchard’s novel, Palmerino, tells the story of Lee's fictional biographer’s (Sylvia Casey) stay at Lee’s former home, the villa Palmerino in Florence, Italy, now a rental property. Saddled with problems, not the least of which is her husband’s abandoning her for another man, Sylvia struggles with the memory of her subject as well as her own memories and the residua of both of their lives.

Sylvia’s story becomes braided with Lee’s or at least with a certain period of Lee’s life when she falls in love with Kit Anstruther-Thomson. Lee comes to haunt Sylvia as her spirit watches over her, mirroring the writer’s supernatural work. Lee’s story eventually dominates as did the woman herself.

Praise on the back cover calls the novel a “jewel” and that it is. Short, dense and brilliant it dazzles, reflecting light on all of its characters. Perhaps too short to be considered a masterpiece this novella does approach perfection and shows Ms. Pritchard at the height of her powers. It will be interesting to see if she is honored with a prize in 2014 or later. I recommend this book highly.

"Palmerino" by Melissa Pritchard is really the story of three women - Sylvia and Vernon Lee, past and present. It is a fictionalized biography of the real writer Violet Paget told through the efforts of the fictional Sylvia, a writer of historical novels, to create a sense of time, love, and history. Sylvia's husband has just left her (for another man) and her publishing house has told her that she must write a better book than her last two or they will have to go their separate ways. Happy (relatively speaking) memories of time spent at the Villa il Palmerino direct her presence to the beautiful city of Florence where she finds Violet, a ghost from the past, guiding her as a muse for this story.

Violet loves deeply but her brash confidence is belied by her shattered self-esteem. She feels unlovable because she is not beautiful, yet she expects love with the awareness of her brilliance and her dreams. For her, love is purely emotional, not physical. She writes books of a supernatural bent and creates fantasy worlds for those she loves and respects, not an easy accomplishment. Vernon Lee is her alter ego; not a man, but a male persona. One that allows her to love women, dress in men's clothing, and speak her mind. During her life in the mid 1800's, she could exist on the fringes of Italian society which is where she loved and needed to be, really the only place she could perpetuate her life. Vernon/Violet yearns for love, acceptance, and family, all the while she is keeping everyone at arms length. A fascinating and frustrating creature to be sure.

Sylvia, on the other hand, seems to exist only through her books. Childless and unloved by a husband who could not really love her, she lives vicariously through her written creations. Once at the Villa il Palmerino, where Violet herself lived for many years, she can see, taste, feel, and smell much of the same things that they both now share. Each trek to a café, a library, a source of information is steeped in the loveliness of Florence and the loneliness she feels is her lot in life. She visits libraries, where she feels most at home, and a lost and secret garden in an effort to know Violet. Parma, the dog who will not stop following her, is her only companion. Meanwhile, Violet (who never left) is aware of her presence and guides Sylvia's hand and mind to tell her story. Each moment, each step, and each thought comingle to create a spooky, ethereal sense of past and present sharing the same space and time. Through the life of Violet she is seeking some sense to her own.

At a relatively scant 190 pages, this could be read in one sitting - a continuous stream of sights and sounds of Italy going about its daily business. It does deliver the ambience of sunny, lazy days. The authors writing style is evocative and it draws you into the lives of others. For instance, fellow bus riders are more than merely weary, instead they are, "...less in need of sleep than some miraculous occurrence -- romance, fortune, exotic travel -- to inject vitality back into their lives." The flowers in the same gardens that Violet enjoyed, the lemon trees, the olive oil - each thing brings a memory, even if it is not your own. Her reliance on the comma to extend each sentence beyond seems a bit excessive, but forgiven considering the streaming river of the story.

The end of Violet's story is melancholy (at end of her life she unable to hear, thereby missing the accolades she so desires) but she is satisfied of a life well-lived and well-loved. The story of Sylvia ends in an unexpected, yet strangely inevitable way that is much more than a twist. Recommended to writers, lovers of Italy and others, and those that are looking for a sensory experience that is both shining and dark. Beautifully written and precisely imagined, this is the timidity of Sylvia and the bravado of Violet meeting in an emotionally satisfying roundabout of the senses.½

This was not a book I found easy to read. I am a big fan of Historical fiction and requested this book because I thought that the subject matter would be appealing to me. However, there was something about the writing style that prevented me from getting absorbed in the story. Sorry! I have to confess that I gave up on this at this time. I may try again at another time to reread.

Palmerino is a beautifully written literary book, framed in the present with past and present sandwiched in between; with a living author ( the narrator) merging and “sandwiching" with a dead author (that author being Violet Paget, better known by her pen name Vernon Lee). The narrator, Sylvia-- so named to represent the forest and foliage around the Palmerino villa--is a novelist. Palmerino gives great insight into the process of writing: the obsession, the thin line characters dance in the space-time continuum, the sometimes insatiable appetite to know and possess another person’s mind, the aggressive and competitive pursuit of an intellectual life, the comforts--and distraction--of food, friends, dogs--when a writer is on a roll. At one point the narrator-and-subject note the quality of the people who cross into their sphere: will they provide intellectual material or social connection? If not, then they useless.

The scenery in the novel is breathtaking--dew saturated ancient shrubbery; candles on trees illuminating gardens at night--the characters are eccentrically appropriate--a long lean Scottish horse woman who is all legs; a old gardner in old clothes who stumbles along cracked paths.

It’s a book to savor--the ending was somewhat an abrupt surprise, so I won’t tell it.½

The life of British writer Violet Paget -- better known by her nom de plume and male persona, Vernon Lee -- seems ripe for novelization. Born into an intellectual family, Violet/Vernon was considered quite ugly (though I confess that every picture I've seen belies this assessment), but also brilliant, gifted especially with language. She spent most of her life in Europe, where she held court in a kind of salon at Palmerino, a villa near Florence. The constellation of writers and thinkers in her orbit reads like a who's who of a late-Victorian anthology: Henry James, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater. One of her best childhood friends was John Singer Sargent.

Violet/Vernon wrote supernatural fiction and researched aesthetics, and was one of the first people to study empathy and art. (This link between science and art explains why Palmerino is published by Bellevue Literary Press, a small, nonprofit press dedicated to publishing works that connect art and science.)

Melissa Pritchard's Palmerino defied my expectations in its structure and plot. I though I'd be reading a straightforward exploration of Violet/Vernon's life and loves, perhaps featuring one of her several lesbian relationships. And indeed, the novel is about Violet/Vernon's life, and about her relationships with Mary Robinson and Kit Anstruther-Thomson. However, Ms. Pritchard approaches her subject through a framing device, following the fictional American novelist Sylvia as she takes up residence at Palmerino to begin work on a novel about Vernon Lee. The perspective alternates among Sylvia, V., and people and, in an interesting twist, places from Vernon's world. Ms. Pritchard is selective about the parts of Vernon's biography included, so the effect is rather like piecing together a puzzle. The elided sections speak through silence, like the turns between stanzas in poetry. The finished composition encompasses biography, the nature of research, genius loci, loneliness, and eroticism -- and it's a fascinating way to enter into Vernon Lee's life.

Note: I received this copy through LibraryThing's Early Reviewers program, in exchange for an honest review.